Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Although Japan has a long and rich history, Western efforts to comprehend, chronicle, and analyze that history are a relatively recent development. The first attempts by Europeans and Americans to explore Japanese history after the “opening” of the nation in the 1850s were the uncoordinated efforts of gentlemen amateurs, non-professionals once described by John Whitney Hall as a “coterie of interested foreign residents of Tokyo.’ With the exception of Sir George Sansom, whose 1931 survey Japan: A Short Cultural History may have been the most important English-language work in the field prior to World War II, “the bulk of Western work on Japanese history was derivative or episodic in nature,” “primarily diplomatic or antiquarian in orientation.’ In the United States and Britain, the academic study of Japan was slow to develop before the war: American colleges and universities, for instance, offered a total of only twenty-one courses dealing with Japan (covering topics from religion to art to literature) in 1930 and, even a decade later, only a handful of institutions provided instruction in Japanese language and history. World War II, however, catalyzed a significant international expansion of scholarly attention to Japan; as the “natural result of the popular boom of interest in Japan stimulated by the war and its aftermath and by the increased opportunities which Westerners had ... log in or subscribe to read full text